New Instrument Driver Tools Reduce Development Time
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Improve code management and reduce development time with the above new LabVIEW 8 instrument driver features.
National Instruments LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers are the most popular type of LabVIEW instrument driver because they maintain a common architecture and interface for controlling stand-alone instruments with very little or no code development. NI provides guidelines on programming style, error handling, front panels, block diagrams, icons, and online help for engineers developing NI LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers. In addition, LabVIEW 8 introduces two important new features – the LabVIEW Instrument Driver Project Wizard and LabVIEW project-style instrument drivers – to save you time when developing instrument drivers and help you better manage instrument driver code development.
LabVIEW 8 Instrument Driver Project Wizard
The new LabVIEW 8 Instrument Driver Project Wizard greatly reduces the time needed to create LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers. The new wizard supports the most common instrument types and walks you through the process of selecting the instrument type, naming the driver, and creating a unifying VI icon banner. Upon completion, the wizard presents you with a fully documented instrument driver based on the industry-defined Standard Commands for Programmable Interfaces (SCPI) protocol. The generated documentation guides you through the process of modifying the source code to support instrument-specific commands. Lastly, the new Instrument Driver VI Creator, included with LabVIEW 8, provides a configuration-based interface for automatically generating VIs containing the specific Virtual Instrumentation Software Architecture (VISA) function calls and string parsing code.
“Our customers prefer LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers for controlling their Tektronix oscilloscopes because of the logical source code structure, error reporting, and documentation,” said David Fink, a Tektronix software engineer. “The new Instrument Driver Project Wizard in LabVIEW 8 reduces instrument driver development time by more than a week, so that creating LabVIEW Plug and Play instrument drivers for Tektronix products has never been easier.”
LabVIEW Project-Style Instrument Drivers
With the lack of a project file management environment in prior versions of LabVIEW, engineers traditionally have relied on using the OS file structure to logically group the functional VIs for LabVIEW instrument drivers. With the introduction of the LabVIEW 8 Project and library, instrument driver developers now can organize functional VIs and example programs directly in the LabVIEW environment. Along with organizational benefits, the LabVIEW library provides a unique namespace for the instrument driver that automatically adds the instrument driver name to the beginning of every functional VI name. By providing a unique name for each VI, you no longer need to worry about naming conflicts resulting in broken code. Finally, the library also gives you the ability to define VIs as either public and accessible to all users or private and only usable by the developer. With the ability to control which VIs are usable, you can maintain a consistent public VI interface while being able to change the underlying private VIs without fear of breaking the user’s code.
Read "Measure in Minutes with LabVIEW Instrument Driver Finder" sidebar.
View an interactive tutorial on programming LabVIEW project-style instrument drivers.
This article first ran in the October 3, 2005, issue of NI News and the Q4 2005 LabVIEW Special Edition issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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